Using
the Monte Carlo ray tracing capabilities in C&R
Technologies' RadCAD,
Olivier Godard and Tejas Shah came up with this visual
simulation of tracking the shadow of the International
Space Station (ISS) on the belly of the Space Shuttle.
The Shuttle is oriented with the payload bay doors
looking nadir (facing earth) while the ISS, traveling
at the same speed at a slightly higher altitude, passes
over the belly of the shuttle blocking the sun's light.

The
image has been postprocessed in RadCAD with the scale
on the left representing the nodal heat flux, the
view being the shuttle belly. The color scale maximum
is 1354 W/m2 which represents full solar heating.
As the ISS passes over the shuttle, the resulting
shadow or blockage is displayed by the blue color
(0 W/m2).

This
simulation could have been performed using a raytracer
for animated movie rendering but the advantage of
RadCAD is that you can obtain a similar result directly
applicable for other thermal related computations.